Parallels Between Fiction and Food Writing

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-224
Author(s):  
Amy Burns
Keyword(s):  
Food Writing

Jane Grigson

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geraldene Holt
Keyword(s):  
Wide Spread ◽  
Art Galleries ◽  
Comprehensive Collection ◽  
Human Happiness ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Radio Programme ◽  
Food Writing

Cookery writing is “almost a form of autobiography,” Jane Grigson remarked on a BBC radio programme in 1987. “It’s been my way of finding out why I’m on this earth, and adding something to the sum of human happiness.” However, when Jane left university in 1949, her food writing career lay almost twenty years ahead of her. She first worked in art galleries and publishers’ offices. In 1953 she joined George Rainbird as a picture researcher and met the author and poet Geoffrey Grigson. A decade working as a translator led to the award of the John Florio Prize with Father Kenelm Foster for the translation of Beccaria’s Of Crimes and Punishment. Jane’s interest in food developed when she and Geoffrey with their daughter, Sophie, began to divide their time between a farmhouse in Broad Town in Wiltshire and a cave house in Trôo in the Loir-et-Cher region of France. Here, in the early sixties, Jane began to research a book on French charcuterie for an English friend, Adey Horton, who later suggested that she also take over the writing. By trawling through French textbooks on the subject in a scholarly exploration of the field and also compiling a comprehensive collection of recipes, Jane demonstrated her skill for research and her talent as a food writer. Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery was published in 1967, to wide- spread acclaim. The book is a well organised survey of a specialised field: highly informative yet with accessible recipes, an educational volume which retains its distinction more than four decades later, and described by Elizabeth David as a kitchen classic.

How Taste Is Made

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Bégin
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Food Systems ◽  
Food System ◽  
First Century ◽  
Environmental Equity ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Local Traditions ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Food Writing

This concluding chapter argues that the New Deal food writing does not provide lessons on how to eat better, nor a cause to dismiss it as a bigoted or failed nation-building attempt. Rather, it offers a reminder that contemporary anxieties about the sensory, political, environmental, social, and moral consequences of the global industrial food system, as well as the drive toward the celebration of local traditions and knowledge, are not a late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century affair but part of a longer historical trend. New Deal food writing offers tools to better understand the challenges of establishing sustainable, pleasurable, and equitable food systems. This is not to disparage efforts at changing industrial foodways, but to emphasize how social and sensory histories of food can create spaces for debates about social, cultural, and environmental equity challenges.

America Eats

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Bégin
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Political Project ◽  
Food Writing

This chapter focuses on the America Eats project and delves into why and how the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) began searching for America's regional cuisines. The narrative explores how, in New Deal food writing, food became a canvas for a sensory, emotional, felt manifestation of national identity. The chapter also examines the limits of this political project as it captures editors and local workers deliberating over which and whose regional foods would be deemed worthy of integration into the American culinary narrative. The analysis takes into account the prescriptive but also unstable and inconclusive nature of America Eats as the understanding of what American food was and who American eaters were evolved over the course of the project. In looking for the taste of the nation, the FWP often stumbled upon regional ethnic tastes that defied the aims of the project.

Sensing Food in the New Deal Era

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Bégin
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Depression ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
Food Writing

This introductory chapter examines taste as a symbolic, cultural, affective, and as economic currency always in circulation, and that, once mobilized, allows eaters to identify and differentiate themselves along race, class, gender, and ethnic lines. The concept of sensory economies is a plural one and allows exploring sensory experiences of food as the result of social, cultural, and financial exchanges always remade. The chapter looks at the cultural, social, and sensory history of New Deal food writing: the multisensory culinary material produced by employees of the Federal Writers's Project (FWP). Throughout, workers produced comforting snapshot pictures aimed at providing cultural confidence to a country in the midst of one of the worst economic depression of its history and giving legitimacy to the new political, social, and economic order of the liberal New Deal state.

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